The Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s: 500-201

Remember when everyone was partying like it was 1999 because it was, in fact, 1999? That was 10 years ago. Yes, the first decade of the 21st century-- "The Aughts"-- is coming to a close, and for music fanatics such as ourselves, that means it's a good time to make some lists. We round up our favorite albums, tracks, and videos at the end of every year, of course, but once in a while we go all-out and tackle an entire decade-- The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s, the Top 100 Albums of the 1990s, and so on. Since Pitchfork has been around for all of the 2000s, we're taking the opportunity to put together a detailed and wide-ranging story-- as told in four lists, four essays, and a timeline of events-- of what happened in music in the last 10 years. About what you'd get from a print magazine, but it's free and you won't throw it out the next time you move.

We start this week by talking about the songs of the decade. We get that 500 is a lot of them; after all, we only listed 200 songs from the 1960s and that's, like, The Greatest Time in Pop Music History. But there was a much greater variety of music released this decade, and also simply a lot more of it. So we did our best to squeeze in as many highlights as possible. We did, however, generally stick to the format of the 60s list-- short critical pieces on our top 200-- but have added today's extended list of honorable mentions in order to provide a larger pool of tracks for you to hear. Thanks to Lala, this feature doubles as a music library that you can return to over and over.

And in early 2010, if you aren't sick to death of reading 10 million lists about the decade and the current year, come back and we'll have added an addendum with a few of our favorite songs from the next few months. Programming note: The album and track reviews on our homepage this week are our most recent Best New Music picks but we are still delivering regular daily news, Forkcast, and Pitchfork.tv updates. To hear most of the tracks, check out our Spotify playlist.